I met Brigitta Wallace in 2004, when my wife and I visited L' Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland. She is passionate about her work and if she thinks the Vikings encamped on New Brunswick I choose to believe her, because the Greenland Vikings had 400+ - years to thoroughly explore what is now Canada and northern portions of the USA.
Wallace also thinks the settlement of Hop might be on New Brunswick; perhaps Straumfjord is there as well, because neither place has ever been found, and they are certainly somewhere up there. I wrote about both encampments in my first novel, The Settlers, An Axe of Iron Novel.
Someday, with luck, one or both lost settlements, or encampments will be found. (Ed.)
***
Archaeologist
not hopeful of finding definite proof
Gail Harding · CBC
News · Posted: Mar 11, 2018 7:00 AM AT | Last Updated: March 11
Birgitta Wallace, senior archaeologist emerita with Parks Canada, says she believes Vikings had summer camps in New Brunswick's Miramichi and Chaleur Bay area. (Contributed/Rob Ferguson) |
Did Vikings
visit New Brunswick's Miramichi and Chaleur Bay areas? According
to the research done by Birgitta Wallace, senior archaeologist emerita
with Parks Canada, they did.
"I'm really
convinced that the Vikings did visit that area. Not all my
colleagues would agree with me," said the woman who's been studying
Vikings for 50 years.
While she is
certain the Vikings did spend time in Miramichi and Chaleur Bay,
she says she is not hopeful of ever finding anything to prove it.
Wallace said she
determined that the second location that Vikings visited in North
America, known as "Hóp," meaning "tidal lagoon," was
in the Miramichi and Chaleur region after she studied the
Vikings sagas. She also drew on her extensive work at L'Anse aux Meadows,
located on the very northern tip of Newfoundland.
Sagas tell
Viking history
The sagas
are contained in medieval documentation from Iceland that goes back to the
oral history of the Vikings. They were not written down until 300 years after
the actual events occurred, so Wallace said the oral telling of the stories may
have changed a bit over time.
"There are
two separate manuscripts...that talk about voyages to what must be North
America because it's land west and south of Greenland."
Wallace said
while Vikings settled on Iceland and then Greenland, they continued exploring —
either by accident or intentionally - to new lands. "These were
people who just settled in Greenland in 985. They were immigrating there from
Iceland."
Wallace said
when voyages began between Norway or Iceland and Greenland, it was
inevitable that someone would get blown off course. She believes this
is how they found North America.
Two versions
The
archaeologist said there are two versions of the story. One talks about
Leif Erikson retracing the watery path of one of these off-course trips, but it
only talks about one settlement where he built a base camp and made four
expeditions.
The other story
features a different person and combines all the expeditions into one that
go between two areas: "Hóp," meaning "tidal
lagoon," a summer camp and a settlement further north described
as being in fjord.
![]() |
Vikings settled at the L'Anse aux Meadows site on the northern peninsula of Newfoundland. (CBC) |
"After
working a lot with the L'Anse Meadows and what we found there,
it's really clear that L'Anse Meadows is base camp...it fits with
everything," said Wallace. "And from that camp... we know they went
farther south and we know they must have gone as far south as eastern New
Brunswick."
Wallace believes
those explorations were done through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which would have
led the Vikings to find the Miramichi and Chaleur regions.
Wallace based
her conclusions on the finding of pieces of wood, butternuts and butternut wood
at the L'Anse Meadows camp.
"And
butternuts have never grown north of northeastern New Brunswick. They are not
native to either P.E.I. or Nova Scotia, so New Brunswick is the closest
location."
Description fits
Wallace said the
descriptions in the sagas match that part of N.B. well.
"It talks
about sandbars outside the coast, rivers and wonderful hardwoods and not
the least, wild grapes. And it so happens that butternuts grow in pretty much
the same location as grapes and ripen at the same time," she
said.
"So,
whoever picked those nuts would have seen those grapes."
Wallace said the
area would have been considered of great importance because it was called
Vinland in the saga, which means wine land.
"Vinland
wasn't one particular spot, it was a land like Iceland and Greenland, a country
or region."
The archaeologist
says she believes about 40 men would spend three months exploring the region,
sleeping in structures built with turf with no permanent roofs, just a
canvas-like material.
"And to
find anything like that after 1,000 years, people that were very anxious I'm
sure to take all their tools and belongings with them back, it's not very
likely that we can ever find particular, physical evidence like we do have
in L'Anse Meadows."
Encounters
with Indigenous inhabitants
But Wallace
points out another strong indication the Vikings visited the area is found
in the strong similarities of the descriptions in Leif Erikson's saga and
Jacques Cartier's journal.
"It is
exactly the same type of description."
Her belief is
strengthened by the saga's description of the Vikings encounters with most of
the Indigenous inhabitants at "Hóp."
![]() |
Birgitta Wallace says the Vikings likely encountered the Indigenous inhabitants of Metepenagiag. (Radio-Canada) |
"That would
fit this area very well," she said. "It would be the ancestors of
Mi'kmaq and you have Red Bank, Metepenagiag which has been inhabited for
3,000 years or more."
Wallace is
finding the sudden interest in this part of the story of the Vikings' expedition humorous considering
she's been researching and writing about it for several years. She thinks an
article she recently had published is the reason.
"Somehow,
it grabbed people's attention," she said with a laugh. "The
interest in Vikings is astounding to me."